Has the Cell peaked? If no, would it work for next gen? - More questions inside

[zarx]

darkknightkryta said:

 

1.  All computer architectures are RISC.  All these "CISC" machines are just an emulated instruction set on top of a RISC set.  This made CISC machines slower as they had to emulate enhanced instructions.  You can put those extra instructions in hardware but it's very costly.  The big thing that Cell brought to the table was parallel programming, which is where the issues lied.  Though when you really look into the matter the PS2 is actually a far more difficult machine to program for than the PS3 ever was and those "Hard to develop for" excuses were just that, excuses (Poor ports actually came due to the different memory and shader architectures between Xenos and the RSX).

2. Next gen engines are designed on APIs, doesn't matter what you write them on you can always recompile them to other machines.  Makes even less difference now that everything has become GPU dependant.

3.  This is very unfortunate though.  Cell is a very well designed chip, and is still one of the more powerfull single processors out there.

4.  Cell is still powerfull and the second update that IBM made before scrapping the chip would still be more than sufficient for a CPU upgrade.  But you're right, no one is manufacturing them.

5.  Cell wasn't a dead end.  All those render farms you see in fancy movies are done with software solutions, it just gives companies like PIxar very flexible output.  But it comes at the cost of render time (An hour a frame I think they managed to get it down too).  It's just that performance vs flexibility won out and GPUs are starting to make their way down to CPUs instead of CPUs up to GPUs.  Going the GPU way down causes flexibility problems though.

1. Like I said RISC was not the CELL's problem in facti it has nothing to do with the CELL's issues. What does CISC being emulated have too do with the problems of the CELL? Did I say CISC was faster? My arguement was that a traditional x86 was more developer freindly than the CELL.

2. True but the CELL is very much not freindly to that. Unless you write code specificly for it performance is terrible, which is one of the reasons many early games sucked on PS3. 

3. It's not really that powerful these days Xenon Phi runs circles around it. 

4. More powerful at a few things all of which a GPU does 10x better. 

5.I have said before in this thread the future is likely heterogeneous computing but the CELL won't be the template for that. For high end CGI flexibility will trump performance just like real time performance trumps flexibility. As soon as hardware acceleration was a thing games moved away from software renderers and they aren't going to go back any time soon, especialy now that GPGPU and programable shaders (and more recently compute and geometry shaders) have increased flexibility of rendering in a GPU such a huge amount.